Pearls, Swine and Soybean Futures

With cameos from Chiang Kai-shek, I. F. Stone, Joe McCarthy, and my father

On November 22, 1954, the lead story in I.F. Stone’s Weekly broke the news that a group of Chinese Nationalist investors linked to Chiang Kai-shek had cornered the market on soybean futures shortly before the outbreak of the Korean War. Chiang’s “henchmen” – as Stone described them – made a cool thirty million on their bet.  U.S. government officials later called the entry of Communist China into Korea a “surprise,” but I.F Stone strongly implies that Chiang and his boys had advance knowledge that war was imminent. The soybean bet gave it away: both Korea and the Manchurian region in China’s northeast were major sources of soybeans. War would surely disrupt supply, driving prices up, and delivering a bonanza to the purchasers of soybean futures.

Further complicating the intrigue, Stone reported, was Senator Joe McCarthy’s decision to bet $10,000 on soybean futures in the same time frame. McCarthy, of course, was one of the leaders of the “Who Lost China” inquisition that tarred the careers of numerous State Department employees as Communist sympathizers. Stone’s reporting suggests that there was some kind of back door connecting McCarthy and Chiang Kai-shek.

As far as I can tell, remarkably little attention has been devoted to following up Stone’s scoop, which is odd given how important the Korean War was for the existence of Taiwan as an independent entity. There’s a good case to be made that the U.S. would have abandoned Taiwan to the tender mercies of the Chinese Communists had it not been for the decision to go to war in Korea. Although one can well argue about the morality of the U.S. supporting Chiang’s KMT even as it was inflicting its White Terror on Taiwan in the 1950s, there is no escaping the reality that there would be no thriving free democracy today on the island previously known as Formosa without those nasty Cold War Politics.

But that’s not why we are here today. We are here to celebrate Izzy Stone! And investigative journalism!

Who was I. F. Stone? I will outsource this question to an obituary my father wrote a week after Stone’s death: The Golden Age of Izzy Stone

During all those Cold War years when they wouldn’t let him into the National Press Club, Izzy published his scoops in his own Washington newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly. By burrowing into government documents nobody else had read, by legwork in the archives and the boondocks, and by never trusting the official cover story, he was ahead of everybody else on human rights atrocities, on Vietnam and on Watergate.

My dad was a big fan of Stone’s investigative journalism. I have a vague memory of my father telling me that as a teenager growing up in Southern California he subscribed to both I.F. Stone’s Weekly and The Congressional Record. My father would have been 15 when Stone broke his soybean futures story, and I am titillated by the thought of him opening up the mail, scrutinizing the news about Joe McCarthy’s mysterious futures bets, and thereby establishing a soybean link tunneling through time and space to my own newsletter nearly sevent decades later.  Alas, he fails to mention any such subscription in his obit or in a Fresh Air review of I.F. Stone’s book, The Death of Socrates. So it may just be wishful thinking.

But there is a link, nonetheless. Stone had his newsletter, and my father edited his high school newspaper, and when I got involved with an underground newspaper at my high school, titled (with all the inflammatory notoriousness we could muster in 1970s Gainesville, Florida) Pravda, he went to the extreme lengths of buying me an industrial-strength mimeograph machine that made a wondrously godawful racket in the spare bedroom of my mother’s home. My father was always a huge supporter of independent journalism, even if that mean gifting the means of production to a son who employed it to, among other things, share information about the price of local marijuana strains and get into feuds with Cat Tracks, my school’s “official” newspaper.

My father was not, strictly speaking, a reporter himself. He was a critic, of books, TV, movies, and, I was just reminded this morning when I googled “john leonard and I. F. Stone,” of his own profession.

How a Caged Bird Learned to Sing, published in The Nation on June 8, 2000, is ostensibly about self-censorship in Big Media but it’s ambit is wide-ranging: it is both self-criticism and social criticism, acerbic and funny, a mourning of lost innocence and a rage against, well, everything. (I remember once asking him, “Do you have to be so angry all the time?” “Yes,” he answered.)

It is, I think, a little too hard on himself. It is also possibly my favorite thing he ever wrote. And it finishes with a prophetic fury (flurry?) that hits in a whole new way a quarter century later.

This is the deepest censorship of the self, an upward mobility and a downward trajectory. Once upon a time way back in high school, we thought of reporters as private eyes. We thought of journalism as a craft instead of a club of professional perkies who worried about summer homes, Tuscan vacations, Jungian analysis, engraved invitations to Truman Capote parties and private schools for our sensitive children. We scratched down an idea on a scrap of yellow paper, typed it up on an Underwood portable, took it below to the print shop, set it on a Linotype machine, read that type upside down, ran off a proof on a flatbed press and seemed somehow to connect brain and word, muscle and idea, blood and ink, hot lead and cool thought. But that was long before we got into the information-commodities racket, where we have more in common with Henry Kravis and Henry Kissinger than we do with paper-makers, deliverymen and Philip Marlowe, or those ABC technicians who were so recently so alone, on strike, on Columbus Avenue. After which our real story is ourselves, at the Century Club or Elaine’s or a masked ball charity scam–Oscar de la Renta, Alex Solzhenitsyn and Leona Helmsley invite you to Feel Bad About the Boat People at the Museum of Modern Art–with plenty of downtime left, after we have crossed a picket line by e-mailing our copy to the computer, to mosey over to Yankee Stadium, where Boss Steinbrenner will lift us up by our epaulets to his skybox to consort with such presbyters of the Big Fix as Roy Cohn and Donald Trump, and you can’t tell the pearls from the swine. 

Yes, well, the soybean seems determined to take me to all kinds of unexpected places. And I’m not complaining, even though today’s rabbit hole has me missing my most dedicated reader all over again. It is good, in this age of the digital newsletter, to be reminded of one’s pioneer forefathers. I’m going to pour one out tonight for I. F. Stone, who never sold out or self-censored, and go burrowing in some boondocks tomorrow for more stories of soybean shenanigans. Confusion to the enemy!